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Viral SlideShare = Google Penalty?

We recently published a slideshow on SlideShare.net and it ended up doing pretty well. It was featured on their homepage for 3 days, and we got quite a few embeds.

Unfortunately, a few days later, our rankings in Google tumbled. I'm wondering if this killed our link velocity, which I suppose would have potentially got us a temporary, automated penalty?

If you look at slide #4 and beyond, you'll notice that the logo links back to our homepage, and there's also a "View Quote" button that navigates to that specific quote, so users can find out more information, share it, or view any associated pictures. So, in total, there are quite a few backlinks in that slideshow (88 to be exact).

Is this what likely caused our drop in rankings? Or is it more likely to be a coincidence? We haven't done anything else in the past couple of months, other than publish an infographic and a press release.

And if this is a problem, how would we fix it? I can edit the slideshare and remove some of the links... but it seems sort of silly considering we haven't done anything blackhat. And, it would actually devalue our slideshow, because users would no longer be able to click through to the quotes.

4 Responses

It's highly doubful. Just having a site like slideshare link back to you would not single-handedly cause your ranking to plummet. My guess is there were already some underlying factors that existed, and you got slapped by Google's Panda 4.0 update.

Take a closer look at any competitors that ranked higher during this time period, and analyze their backlink profile in Moz's OSE. I would look for clues as to what is working well in your industry for both users, and search engines.

Well, it's not necessarily SlideShare linking to me that I'm worried about. It's the sites that have embedded the slide, in combination with the amount of backlinks in that slide.

While we did see our rankings fall with the 4.0 update, we rebounded a few days later. And even more mysterious... we actually started to rank #1 for many "current event" keywords such as "memorial day quotes".... even though we had zero backlinks to the article... and the article didn't rank 1 until the holiday actually rolled around, which makes me wonder if it could have potentially been a manual boost in rankings. Same exact thing happened with "father's day quotes". As soon as it rolled around, we jumped to #2 in the rankings.

Everything seemed to be going very well, right up until about 3 days ago, which is when our rankings crashed.

We saw some similar ranking movement, in which sites rose very high, then settled towards the bottom of the page. This could possibly be due to the update getting implemented, then being finalized. I am all for the proactive approach, but I think you should wait about a week before making any changes on your site. While you are waiting to see if anything shifts again, do some competitor analysis. Take a look and see who replaced your spot. See if there is anything they do better. This way, if nothing changes you have a better plan of action of what areas need "fixing"

It would be good to check your backlink profile. I am unable to view the slideshare so cant really say much in that regards. However, if you pay close attention to the backlink profile and also the newly acquired links, it would tell you a lot about the penalization (if its a penalization.

Go through all the links and see how many of those websites are not decent quality websites.

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